The Ivory Swing (9 page)

“But Mrs Gandhi is a woman!” Juliet pointed out. “What I find puzzling is that all the books I read before I came to India said that the women of Kerala were very advanced and independent because Kerala was a matriarchy. They said that women here were freer than in North India. But I do not find this true at all. Your women are not independent. You do not permit them many freedoms.” She was afraid to mention Yashoda. “And yet your inheritance laws have been traditionally matriarchal.”

Anand explained. “Matriarchy,” he said, “means
nephew
inherits, not son.”

“That doesn't make sense!”

“But yes!” Anand was patient. “A man can never he certain beyond all doubt that he is the father of his wife's children. But his
sister's
son must carry the family blood even if the sister has been with many men.”

Juliet laughed sourly. “So much for matriarchy.”

13

In the mornings now, just at daybreak, they woke to a rhythmic drumming in the foundations of the house: the throbbing of threshing flails. This was harvest month and even though there was a problem with nightly rain — local opinion was divided as to whether this was a prolonging of the first monsoon or a premature arrival of the second — the harvest was nevertheless proceeding. But the rain was flattening the crop and lessening the yield and making the threshing more difficult.

Twice a year the rice was harvested. Every sixty days the coconuts yielded another cash crop. Even the most frequently walked tracks between the trees and through the banana clumps and around the lotus pond and the rice paddy seemed always about to slither out of sight like snakes under dense grass. It occurred to Juliet that everyone got up at dawn to keep the jungle at bay, to pit the human passion for taming and tending against all that raging growth. If we overslept one morning, she thought, the clove vines might smother the house. We would never cut our way out of the thicket.

Impenetrable, everything was impenetrable. Like the wall of family surrounding Yashoda. A day after the dinner party she had been spirited away. Or so it seemed. Only the old maidservant was in the house in the forest and she was unable — or afraid — to understand Juliet's Malayalam. Juliet made tactful inquiries at the Nair house. Had Yashoda gone to visit relatives? The Nair family raised its eyebrows in bewildered innocence. What could Mrs David Juliet mean? Their kinswoman continued to live quietly, as was proper, on the estate. Perhaps she had been walking in the forest when Mrs David Juliet visited. Or perhaps, through shame, she had hidden herself.

Yet for two weeks now, no matter what time of day Juliet visited the house beyond the paddy, Yashoda was mysteriously absent. And the old maidservant, like a tropical sibyl, mouthed riddling responses to all questions; oracular Malayalam, impenetrable.

Perhaps Yashoda was simply
maya
, illusion? Perhaps she dandled in and out of reality on the pendulum of Juliet's imagination, a figment of need, a reflection in a well, a transposed identity on an ivory swing.

Crouching now over the low sink, pounding at the sheets, Juliet felt faint with heat and exertion, dizzy, trapped in the web of dankly green days.

Soak, rub, wring. I should capitulate and hire a servant. Scrub, twist, pound. I feel a hundred years old.

All her finger joints were swollen and in the mornings she had to massage her stiff and painful hands to life.

One of your problems, she told herself, is that you never know when you're beaten.

She slumped on the floor beside the sink and leaned her head against the polished stone bench.

And Jeremy came riding out of the West to cut his way through jungle walls and rescue her with a kiss from the drowsy tropics.

Once, long before David, they had spent a day together hiking through springtime woods, drifting apart to pick berries and lilacs. She had lost her footing on a muddy embankment, pitching downwards into a clump of wild raspberry canes. Her ankle had caught on something, a root, a stump fragment, she could not tell. She was strafed with scratches and her twisted ankle throbbed. With every move she made to extricate herself the thorns clutched at her clothing and tore her skin.

She called out to Jeremy and he called back, but their voices echoed weirdly in the still woods and it was some time before he pinpointed the direction of her cries and found her. By then blood was trickling down her cheeks and arms and legs. What she remembered most was the sudden whiteness of Jeremy's face and the reckless way he hauled and ripped at the endless looping raspberry runners.

They were both covered in scratches and flecked with beads of blood and they lay on the grass beside the raspberry canes and the lilacs. For a long time they had simply clung to each other.

The memory came back to her now, sharp and clear as physical sensation, thrusting its way into her vision, between her thighs. She felt weak and swollen and filled with Jeremy. Then he had picked lilacs and covered her with them, on her belly in her hair, between her legs. She remembered lying there sticky with their mingled juices and blood, smelling of fertility and springtime.

My god, she thought, disturbed, why is all this coming back to me now?

She stirred and sat up again. She brushed the scene like a bothersome cobweb from her eyes and carried the basket of wet laundry up to the roof.

Then she saw riding towards her, not Jeremy through the raspberry canes, but the mailman on his bicycle which bucked its way along the path between the coconut palms. He was a bizarre figure in his widely flared khaki “Bombay bloomers”. He also wore a khaki shirt and knee-high khaki socks and a pith helmet, and seemed to have stepped out of a Somerset Maugham story or an old movie of the British Raj.

His visits were disappointingly rare, though momentous, and Juliet hurried downstairs to meet him. Such astonishing proof he brought that the world beyond Trivandrum continued to exist after all, just as though there were no rice harvest; that distant relatives continued to live by schedules and timetables; that remote banks and mortgage companies and other such institutions actually expected them to fill in forms by certain prescribed dates without understanding that they had stepped quite outside of time.

But the mailman had no airletters bearing foreign imprints. Only a postcard from Delhi, the Red Fort against a blue sky. And scrawled across the back:

Have sleeping bag, backpack, and Hindi dictionary. Can't tell for certain when I will reach you. Am hiking around, using bus and train, and stopping where whim and love affairs take me. Currently spending a few days with a gorgeous man named Dinesh who's a scriptwriter for the Indian movie industry. Friend of a friend. He studied film at Ryerson and I looked him up. He's a great Hindi teacher among many other talents of which I won't speak on a postcard. You may meet him when I come, who knows? Love, Annie.

How easy it must be to be Annie, Juliet thought. Untrammelled.

She felt suddenly that she wanted to leave India before her sister arrived, before she was consumed by a jealousy of Annie's freedom. But then thought: Perhaps she will jolt me back to life; perhaps she will refresh me with an awareness of the gains that balance the losses. Perhaps I will catch her off guard and glimpse the underside of freedom which is quite possibly not as dazzling as it seems from weary middle age. Perhaps I should look at her clinically, close up, before I do anything irrevocable.

14

David always left the house early, savouring the quiet green walk through the coconut trees before facing the shadeless heat of the road and the madness of the buses. He was startled one morning by the sudden appearance of Yashoda. Was she returning from a walk or had she been waiting for him? It was weeks since they had seen her.

“Professor David,” she said softly, looking up at him through the folds of the sari that she had pulled across her face like a veil. “Will you permit me to speak with you a few minutes?”

Her sari was plain white, of fine cotton. She was without jewellery. There was nothing to detract from the exquisite perfection of her unadorned face.

“Please!” she begged, her dark eyes hugely dramatic above the white veil. “I have only you who can help me.”

Oh lady, he breathed silently. Don't hand me so much power. I don't know what to do with it.

“What has happened?”

“As you see … they have taken all my silk saris and my jewels. Except for some that I keep hidden in a chest beneath the floor of my house. Always, since they sent me to Palghat, I have hidden gold in several places so that I can buy my freedom. Now circumstances are not looking auspicious again. I think they are knowing about my visit to the market, although nothing can be proved. But there is such harshness, and I am to go nowhere, nowhere. Professor David, I am going mad with boredom and loneliness.”

She moved closer, like a supplicant, and instinctively he reached to comfort, a hand on her shoulder, the other lightly brushing her satiny cheek. A momentary gesture.

“What can I do?” he asked.

She clasped his hand. “You have such power, such authority with Shivaraman Nair. Could you not be my protector, my guardian,
now,
as you were suggesting it could be in your country? Could you not take me into the family? I could be — how do you call it? — the nanny for the children. I could go everywhere with you. I could be free. Oh, there would be a little scandal, but I would not care. There is nothing he could do to you.”

David knew then how the hapless fly feels, cradled in the sticky caress of the web, embroiled in a net from which there would never be any escape.

“Yashoda,” he said. Gently, firmly, professorially With conviction and with cowardice, with integrity and with panic. I am a guest of Shivaraman Nair. I am a scholar of this culture, someone who tries to be sensitive to it, to understand why its rules are different from ours. I cannot … it would be grossly improper for me to violate those rules.”

“They are not
my
rules,” she said tearfully.

“I know,” he sighed. “But they are Shivaraman Nair's.”

“Even my father disagrees with him.”

“And it must be your father who helps you. I am an outsider. I cannot, I simply cannot abuse my host's —”

“Oh Professor David, you have lied to me. Only you have sufficient power. You said you would help me.”

“I will, I will. Please don't look at me like that. I will speak to Shivaraman Nair. I will write to your father today.”

“But this will be taking so long before anything changes, Professor David. And perhaps they will send me to Palghat again and I will have to do the work of a village widow. Out in the courtyards, the sun will turn my skin to leather and my hands to chaff and I will become old and ugly.”

“That would not be possible, Yashoda. You are the most exquisite … the most beautiful —”

“But it
is
true, it
is
true!” she insisted. “Have you not seen the women who sit in Shivaraman Nair's courtyard? The ones without colour in their saris, with faces brown and cracked as dead palm leaves? Haven't you seen them?”

“Yes, I've seen them. But Yashoda, they are old women.”

“Yes,” she said bitterly. “Truly they are old women. They are Nair widows. One of them is twenty-six years old, and one is thirty and the others are not yet forty. But I am young, young …!” She began to beat on his chest with her hands, drumming her way out of prison. “I want … before I shrivel up and become old … I want … I have never had … since my husband died …” Her energy petered out in a whimper and she whispered: “I want love, Professor David.”

Oh no, he thought. Oh no. Don't complicate my life in this way. I have no skill at all in handling complications of this sort.

“Of course,” he said awkwardly, holding her two hands between his, calming her. “It is understandable. You are missing your husband …”

“Our parents chose for us, Professor David. We did not meet before the betrothal. He was a shy man, not handsome.”

Yakshi
indeed, he thought, striving to stay free of her spell. Bewitching. Oh I could take you so easily for all the wrong reasons. Your vulnerability and mine. He knew now that it was within him, the capacity for heedless impulse. Because of Susan, he knew that he did not always know what he might do. It terrified him.

“I will write to your father, Yashoda. It is all I can do.”

He leaned down and kissed her gently, chastely on the forehead. When he turned to watch her drift away towards the paddy, he saw Juliet, obscured and dappled through overhanging palm branches, battling with the laundry on the roof of the house.

Did she see us? he wondered uneasily.

15

Is it solitude itself that causes strange fears? Juliet wondered. Or only the sense of lost powers? This nervousness I feel, this premonition of misfortune at the sight of Yashoda battering David's heart with her fists, is it simply the primitive fear of being eclipsed? Or is it a more violent sympathy for Yashoda? Is it our intimate and kindred knowledge of cages, of the trapped bird beating its futile wings?

She seemed to see a confusion of blood and brilliantly mangled feathers, an inevitable wounding, a bird of paradise plummeting endlessly past the stares of small Canadian towns and Indian villages alike. Flamboyance will not be tolerated, the impassive watchers said. We do not permit changes.

“It's always been done this way, dear,” the woman on the telephone said to Juliet. There was only the gentlest hint of frost in her voice. “I don't think it would be very nice for a new young faculty wife to upset tradition, do you?”

Nice! Juliet thought with dismay. I have never wanted to be nice.

“It's the great occasion of the year,” the woman continued. “When the alumnae return and the board of trustees gathers, we have tea and sandwiches in Winston Hall. And the young faculty wives have
always
poured tea. It's a great honour.”

“Yes, I'm sure it is. I can fully appreciate …” Juliet struggled to be politely regretful. “It's just that there must be many others to whom it would mean more … And I'm terribly busy, teaching part-time you see, and working on a book.”

“A book! Oh my dear, how sweet. Such clever young wives we get these days. A children's story for the little one on the way?”

“No, actually it's a history of political campaign strategies I began when I was —”

“But you
must
take a rest, dear. All work and no play … Now were assembling in the lounge of Winston Hall at three and I've got you on the first shift. And one more thing, it's traditional to wear white gloves for the occasion. The silverware, you know.”

“I regret that I must decline.”

“My dear, it simply isn't done, to decline.”

And at three o'clock, gloveless, Juliet held a baroquely silver teapot as though it were a weapon, pouring tea into Royal Albert cups and thinking scalding thoughts. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, a black velvet mini-skirt — the year was late in the sixties, a decade which had left Winston untouched — and black mesh stockings.

“After all,” she had told David furiously, “it's a wake, isn't it? The end of my life as a normal intelligent woman!”

Among the pastel silks and gloved hands and coiffed hairdos, she looked like a witch's foundling. She tossed the long blonde mane of her hair like an unbroken colt who will never consent to be bridled.

“Oh my dear!” The telephone voice, stricken, materialized at Juliet's side and Juliet turned to offer combat with flashing eyes. She knew what the woman would look like, had already pictured her when they spoke on the phone — silver-blue hair lacquered into place, figure corseted in rectitude, vapid bourgeois eyes — but in fact she was frail and bird-like, vibrant; and aghast as a robin who has found her nest wantonly smashed. Juliet thought of grandmothers and of gentle souls who mourn for the past.

Immediately contrite, she thought: I am just as judgmental and insensitive, just as dogmatic. What right do I have …?

“I am Mrs MacDougall,” the woman said, extending her hand in mournful reproof, “and I do reproach myself for not explaining adequately the formality of the … you poor child, you must be dying of embarrassment.”

“No, oh no, not at all,” Juliet said hastily. She set the teapot down and took Mrs MacDougall's soft-gloved hand in her own. “It's entirely my fault. I'm sorry, truly I am. I didn't even stop to think you might be hurt. I just thought it better to establish that I'm not the tea-pouring type. I'm only a faculty wife by a kind of accident. I mean I don't think of myself that way at all.”

Mrs MacDougall put a slightly trembling hand to the cameo brooch at her throat. “There are some of us,” she said softly, “who made brief brave stands a few centuries ago when we were young. And had to spend our lives learning to take defeat gracefully. My dear — Juliet, isn't it? — I believe I will like you, but I fear for you. I hope Winston will not be too unkind.”

It seemed a quaint warning and Juliet never gave it a second thought. But there were many guests at the alumnae reunion who were less inclined to make allowances, and though Juliet was indifferent to their disapproval she was to learn, over the years, that a small town has subtle and sometimes vicious ways of not forgiving deviations from the norm.

Juliet imagined the Nair women pouring tea under the savage sun. I'm afraid, she thought she heard them murmuring to one another, that Yashoda is not being very nice about the proprieties. I'm afraid she is not fitting in.

She wanted to seize Yashoda and warn her: Don't fight. It's useless. You'll destroy yourself and I can't bear to watch.

“Mommy! You're hurting me!” Miranda's voice was full of alarm.

Juliet blinked, surfacing as from sleep. “Where are we?”

“Near the market, I think. It's hard to see.” Jonathan, solicitous, touched her face. “Is your forehead all right?”

“My forehead?” She felt the swelling with her fingers and a spreading bruise gave back soft bleats of pain. “Jonathan, what happened?”

“You bumped it when the taxi stopped. Will they let us through, Mommy?”

Let us through?

She tried to focus, dazed, and saw that the taxi was stranded in a sea of demonstrators, red banners tossing above their heads, hundreds of faces pressed up against their frail lives like threats.

Dear god, she prayed urgently, cradling the children to herself, feeling the prickle of excitement and of fear.

“What do they want?” she asked the driver in Malayalam.

He turned, uneasy and said something she did not understand. It was, she supposed, meant to be reassuring, but she watched helplessly, caught in the slow awful sway of a nightmare, while he opened his door and got out and abandoned them to the crowd. Can this possibly be happening, she wondered, or am I still hallucinating?

Faces clustered at the open door and she stared back at them, impassive, paralyzed.

She stared into a face she remembered — from where? From an almost forgotten accident by the egg man's stall — and said to it, as though repeating a catechism: “My children are beautiful as nutmeg plants, but the sweet sandalwood must also burn.”

She might have struck the young man with a whip. He leaped onto the running board of the old car, grabbed a megaphone from another marcher, barked orders at the crowd which fell back like a tide receding. He threw himself behind the wheel and drove until the red banners were far behind them, until there was only the normal tumult of bullock drivers and thousands of pedestrians and buses and auto-ricks and cows.

Beside the canal that meandered from the market down to the temple, he stopped and turned to face his passengers.

“Thank you,” Juliet said simply. “Oh thank you. Without you I wonder what might have … would anything bad have happened?”

“Who can say?”

He was watching her as though she were a map he was learning to read. “You remembered me,” he said. “You remembered my words.”

It seemed to astonish him, to suggest to him a hitherto inconceivable connection between them.

“One remembers insults,” she said evenly. “And moments of danger”

Instantly she regretted it, seeing his lips tighten.

“This is not a good time for you to be in Kerala.” He was harsh, flinging advice her way as he might throw crusts to a starving dog. “The clashes in Delhi — Mrs Gandhi, Desai. And many of us are wanting neither. Go back where you are coming from, rich lady. To where no one is crying for food. I am being too busy finding rice for my family to keep on saving yours.”

“You don't even know who we are,” she cried, stung. “You don't know anything about us.”

But he was gone.

In the oven of the driverless car they felt sick with heat and foreignness and dangers too closely brushed. The canal water and the mango trees beckoned.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept
… The psalm came to Juliet suddenly from childhood, an echo of a devout grandmother's recipe for solace. “The Psalms have never failed me, Juliet. An answer for every human sorrow.” And there was further comfort in the warm muddy water of the canal as it bathed their ankles.
But how shall we sing in a strange land?

“What will we do?” Jonathan asked.

“We'll sit here and rest. And think what to do.”

And think what to do. We need help, we need comfort, we need a friend.

But whom did she know in this city? She knew the egg man and the vegetable man and the woman who sold limes. There were a few dozen words she could exchange with them. She knew her landlord and his family with whom formalities must be kept. She knew a young widow who was forbidden to spend time with them, and an angry young man who appeared and disappeared in market-place commotions. And once at the beach she had met a courteous gentleman … yes, who had later sent a
peon
with a message to the Nair estate. They had been out when he came but had found the note.

With the energy of fresh optimism she rummaged in her canvas bag. Somewhere, somewhere, forgotten till now … There it was, an address and a phone number. But how would she call in a city of no public telephones? A city where only a handful of wealthy landowners and merchants were fortunate enough … “Mr Motilal's emporium!” she exclaimed. “He cannot refuse me.”

And indeed Mr Motilal, purveyor of antiques, graciously consented.

And Mr Matthew Thomas, friend of wanderers, caused difficulties to vanish like morning mists. “You must be staying right there in Mr Motilal's emporium where there is air-conditioning, isn't it? And I am coming very swiftly. Most immediately.”

It was not, of course, so very immediate. But eventually he picked them up in his car and took them to the Simla Coffee House, an unsuspected island of serenity behind the Secretariat.

“I am very grateful,” Juliet said as the children sighed happily over mango-flavoured ice-cream. We were so shaken up. Is it really dangerous? Would the students attack us?”

“Huh!” With a wave of his hand, dismissing flies. “Kerala is always like this. It is nothing. Empty noise.”

“Is it really nothing? No danger at all?”

Her relief was evident.

Watching her, he thought of his daughter Kumari bewildered among snowstorms and the deadly unimaginable speeds of automobiles on highways.

“Oh,” she said, “I'm so glad we met!” Impulsively she clasped his hands and after a moment of shock at the impropriety, after a nervous glance around him to see if they were observed, he patted her arm in a fatherly way, willing solace upon his distant daughter.

Wistfully he asked: “Will there be someone for Kumari …? Someone to explain?”

Who can say? she thought, echoing the gruff young man who had saved and then abandoned them. Who could say? All over the world there were cruelties and thoughtlessness. And also instinctive acts of kindness.

“Oh I hope …” She saw the plea in his eyes, the way he willed her to promise happiness for his daughter. “I think … oh yes, surely there will be someone like you for Kumari.”

She had not realized what power she had to confer blessing.